Analogy and the dual-route model of morphology

Abstract

Abstract Prasada and Pinker's (1993) subjects provided past tense forms of nonce verbs. The subject's willingness to provide irregular past tense forms correlated with the verb's phonological similarity to existing irregular English verbs. However, there was no correlation between the number of nonce verbs assigned regular inflection, and the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs. According to the dual-route model, this is expected since irregular items are stored in associative memory, while regular items take an allomorph of -ed by rule. A singleroute connectionist simulation failed to duplicate the subject's behavior on regular verbs. Two instance-based models were applied to the data: Analogical Modeling of Language and the Tilburg Memory Based Learner. Each model employed a similarity algorithm to determine the behavior of all regular and irregular items. Both models successfully mirrored the subject's responses. Therefore, the data are consistent with an instance-based single-route model of morphology.